Our Old Latest Updates
Our Old Latest Updates
Even though we spend most of our time playing around with shapes and sums in the Murderous Maths Organisation,
we are aware that there's a bigger world out there and occasionally we like to show little things that
interested us in the "Latest Updates" section of our website.
Some of the bits that have been and gone are reproduced here just for fun!
We get a lot of our stories from a magazine called The Week
They collect all the top news, best stories, off-beat opinions and sneaky gossip from all over the planet and pack it into neat little chunks so that we can read it without getting utterly muddled. We love it. If you're interested in the news then you can get trial issues of the week from The Week Website. |
FUN FACTS - if you like maths trivia then look out for the flashing green light.
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Do you want to boost your maths skills? Then play... SNAKES AND LADDERS! This was tried on volunteers in Pittsburgh, USA and after just three 20 minute games they were scoring much higher on number tests! 
We read this in THE WEEK April 2008. |
More than a quarter of UK adults struggle to add up prices in their heads and 47% of them wish they had learnt more maths at school. We believe it! Look what Prime Minister Gordon Brown was secretly reading while Alastair Darling was delivering the budget. If only they'd done their sums properly in the first place! We read this in THE WEEK March 2008. |
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When the UK Revenue and Customs lost two CDs with millions of people's private details, they decided to spend £1,500,000 on a new slogan to fill us with confidence. After weeks of meetings and "brainstorming" days they nearly went for a fluffy pink logo saying THANK YOU, but instead opted for the much groovier HMRC AMBITION. Isn't it a relief to know our tax and VAT isn't wasted? We read this in THE WEEK Feb 2008. |
It's amazing where the MM books turn up. Recently a copy of NUMBERS The Key To The Universe was used to entertain an inmate in St Helena Prison in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean! Our very own Blade Boccelli says hello Many thanks to the glorious Mrs Pam Garnett for letting us know! |
A 6ft giant octopus in Newquay's Blue Reef aquarium has fallen for a Mr Potato Head toy. He was given it for Christmas and won't let it go! We read this in The Week Jan 2008 |
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A SCHOOLKID'S DREAM!
A German policeman handcuffed a teacher during a safety demonstration - and then found he'd left the key at home. While he phoned for help, the class of 6 and 7 year olds applauded wildly. Wahey! We read this in The Week Dec 2007 |
LOOSE CHANGE!
There are £11,000,000 worth of 1p coins lying around lost at the bottom of ladies handbags, and £26,000,000 worth in UK gutters! In total the Royal Mint made 651,000,000 new pennies last year. We read this in The Week Nov 2007 |
Have you got £250,000,000 to spend?
About £1 billion of vouchers were given as Christmas presents in 2007, but shops estimate that 25% of them will never be spent. Make sure you use yours!
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WHO MADE ALL THE FLIES?
80% of the zips in the world are made in one town! Every year the people of QIAOTOU, CHINA make enough zips to go right around the world FIVE times. (And just in case your trousers don't have a zip, you'll be interested to know that they also make 15 billion buttons a year, which is 60% of the world's total.) We read this in The Week Nov 2007 |
The RICHEST British person of all time is... ALAN THE RED!
He was a knight who came over with his uncle William the Conqueror and massed up the equivalent of £81 billion! That's four times as much as Lakshmi Mittal, the richest person alive in Britain now. We read this in The Week Oct 2007 |
Britain's 17,000,000 computer mice move a total of 133,000 miles in an hour which is the same as going round the world about FIVE times! | ||
VIVE LA DIFFERENCE!The top picture shows the French President Nicolas Sarkozy on holiday. Underneath is how the same picture appeared in the magazine Paris-Match. Apart from the changes in colour - can you see a difference between the two pictures? Hint: the bloke who owns Paris-Match is one of the president's best friends. Drag your mouse over the red panel for the answer:
We saw this in The Week September 2007 |
The 3m diameter GARDEN CLOCK!
In the seventies the 100-year old clock at London's St Pancras Station was smashed to bits in an accident. Our huge respect goes to Roland Hoggard who collected all the pieces and has since rebuilt it and attached it to his barn! St Pancras are now copying it to make themselves a new clock this year. We read this in The Week August 2007 |
26% of men say they would not date a woman with 2 or more cats.
36% of women would not date a man who shared his bed with a pet. 48% of women would not date a man who owned a spider. And there's one woman we know who would not date a man who owned a Deluxe Burger Bar. We read these facts in The Week August 2007 | ||
A MEAN INSULT !
"Every time a Conservative MP leaves to join the Labour party, there is a small increase in the average IQ of both parties."
We read this in The Week July 2007 |
Saving The Planet
Congratulations to last week's LIVE EARTH concert (7th July 2007). It must have been the greatest ever pop concert since the week before when we had the Princess Diana Concert, and that must have been the best concert since... oooh ... the week before when we had the Glastonbury festival.
Rock on. |
The Blair Telephone Problem
As Margaret Thatcher discovered, one of the main problems you have to deal with when you give up being prime minister is that you've completely forgotten how to dial a phone number. For the last ten years, if Tony Blair wanted to talk to somebody, he'd just say "Get me Veronica Gumfloss" and in seconds somebody would pass him a phone with the right person on the other end. But at least it's not as silly as the ex-USA president Ronald Regan's problem. Whenever he was being driven round in the US, they would clear the roads so that his car only needed to stop when he'd got to where he needed to be. Unfortunately he got so used to this that when he was being driven round London, everytime the car stopped at traffic lights he tried to get out. | ||
AWESOME ODDS!Jacqueline Gagne lives in the Californian Desert and took up golf just four years ago. Local tv were amazed when she claimed in that time she'd hit 13 holes in one, so they went to film her. WHACK - she hit her 14th on tv! It's almost impossible to work out the chances of this but one expert says it's something like 12 septillion to one. In other words it's... 12,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 : 1 Her only problem is that it's getting expensive. Tradition says you buy drinks for everybody when you hit a hole in one, and she drinks posh champagne! Find out about chance in Do You Feel Lucky? We read this in The Week June 2007 |
There are 21 million CCTV cameras in the world and 20% of them are in Britain!
We read these facts in The Week May 2007
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Flying Fish
When you buy food "Grown Locally", you've got every right to think that it hasn't travelled hundreds of miles, using up fuel and so polluting the air. Here in the UK, people living in Kent were buying sprouts at their supermarket labelled "Grown Locally". What it didn't mention was that the sprouts were driven 200 miles to a sorting plant in Birmingham, flown to Poland (nearly 1,000 miles) for peeling and washing, flown back to Birmingham and then driven back to Kent. Now we've heard that fish caught off Canada's east coast are flown to China for processing then flown back to Canada to be eaten - that's about 10,000 miles! |
In 1931 there were 2.3 million cars on the road and 7,000 deaths. In 2006 there were 33 million cars on the road and only 3,150 deaths.
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 The EMMA MAERSK cargo ship (also known as SS SANTA) has an anchor weighing 29 tons. She's just delivered 11,000 freight containers of Christmas presents from China which is enough to fill a train 44 miles long!
We read this in The Week Nov 2006 |
Einstein's Driver!
We read this in The Week Jan 2007 |
At any one time there are almost half a million people flying on aeroplanes.
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We offer our BIG respect to...
Mr RICHARD BUTLER Derby City Council are trying to force him to sell his garden so they can build a road through it. When he put up a sign trying to get a bit of support they took him to court for illegal advertising. So he had a BRILLIANT idea. He has sold of thousands of tiny bits of his garden for £1 each, and now if the council want to build over it they have to contact every single owner, and a lot of them live abroad! We read this in The Week Sept 2006 |
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We're interested to hear that the European Parliament is allowing speeches to be made in IRISH from 2007 and all the EU documents will be translated into Irish too.
Incidentally only 5 MEP's actually speak Irish (and they all speak other languages). There are already 20 official languages and the translation costs for all the documents and interpreters is over ONE BILLION EUROS a year which is E2.25 for every person in Europe. Irish will cost an extra E677,000.
So who's next? Well obviously the Welsh want to be recognised, and our MM readers in the Spanish region of Catalan should get a chance as there are twice as many of them as there are people who speak Irish. There's also one old lady near Penzance who can still speak Cornish...
First posted July 2006. | ||||
THE BIGGEST MAZE IN THE WORLD
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A ROONEY FACT:
(Unless he's sent off in which case everybody else runs 7.3 miles to get away from him.) |
A PEACOCK has fallen in love with a PETROL PUMP! For the last 3 years the 8 year-old bird has been walking 1/4 mile to his local garage in the Forest of Dean, Gloucester to show off his plumage. Apparently the pump makes the same clicking noises of a broody peahen when it's being used! We read this great story in The Week June 2006 | ||
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GOOD NEWS! The UK 2 pence coin is now worth...
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01:02:03:04:05:06 |
We were delighted to hear that footballer DAVID BECKHAM (we like him) buys 30 pairs of underpants every fortnight.
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We offer our BIG respect to
Eugenie Howard-Johnson at St Saviour's and St Olaves School, Walworth, London! She's started a popular after-school club where the girls learn to rap in LATIN!
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90mph on a Skeleton! We offer our huge respect to SHELLEY RUDMAN who just won a silver medal at the Winter Olympics for shooting down an ice tunnel on a tiny sledge! She first saw the sport (called "skeleton" !) 4 years ago, and in that time she trained herself up - and furthermore she got the good people of her village of Pewsey, Wiltshire to raise the £4,000 she needed to compete. |
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The Day the Stars Died We're horrified to hear that Madame Tussauds in London is closing the London Planetarium. It's got seats you lie back in and there's a domed ceiling onto which they project the night sky with stars, planets, nebulas, asteroids and tell you all about it. It's been one of the best things in London for 50 years. So what are they replacing it with? Pictures and models of "real" stars - in other words people from soap operas and reality telly shows. By the way it costs £22.99 to get into Madame Tussauds. But from the sound of it, we'd pay that much to get out. |
How many letter "f"s can you count here:
Three? Well you're wrong! Do it again and CONCENTRATE!
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If all the lego in the world was divided up equally we'd all get 30 pieces each.
So what will you make with yours? We read this lovely little fact in THE WEEK Jan 2006 |
HOW MANY INSECTS WILL YOU EAT IN 2006?
Here's something to think about: During this year, approximately 2.7 trillion insects will be accidentally eaten by humans. That's 2,700,000,000,000 insects. Add on to this the number eaten in tv's "I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here" and it's getting to be quite a big number. We read this in THE WEEK Jan 2006 |
A very large man who looks like this has just come into our office and he insists that we tell our groovy mad-for-it Murderous Maths fans that the best party band in York is called HUGE.
So there you are then, HUGE it is. That's the best party band in York. Please don't forget that for our sakes. Thank you. |
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Wahey!
Big respect is due to SCOTLAND because they have just won the December 2005 WORLD ELEPHANT POLO CHAMPIONSHIPS. Now THAT'S what we call sport. |
A BRAZILLION?
This story is probably NOT true but...
We read this in The Week Oct 2005 |
An American Indian tribe are planning to build a glass-bottomed walkway that sticks out about 1200 metres (about 3/4 of a mile) above the Grand Canyon! Fancy a little walk anyone? We read this in The Week Sept 2005 |
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The average woman swallows 3lb of LIPSTICK during her life! (That's about 1.5 kg, which is one and half normal sized bags of sugar.)
It makes you wonder how much lipstick clowns must swallow! |
Oh I do like to be beside the seaside...
Scientists have found this rare species of crab in the Bristol Channel that disguises itself by wearing a SPONGE on its head! If it can't find a sponge, it'll use anything - even an old flip flop.
This is TRUE and we read it in The Week July 2005 |
CONGRATULATIONS TO BIC - who have recently sold their 100 billionth biro.
That's 100,000,000,000 pens! They've been selling on average 57 pens every second since 1950 and if they were laid end to end they'd reach the moon and back 20 times!
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ONE BILLION SECONDS AGO... it was the year 1974 and Abba were singing "Waterloo".
ONE BILLION MINUTES AGO... it was the year 104 ad and paper was invented in China.
ONE BILLION HOURS AGO... it was the stone age.
We read this in The Week June 2005 |
A Bad Time to be Rude About Food!London won the Olympic bid over Paris by just FOUR votes.Just before the decision was made French President Jacques Chirac said Britain had the worst food in the world apart from Finland. Whooops! Finland has 2 olympic committee members. What a shame if we were to find out they voted for London rather than Paris because of that remark - because a bit of simple maths tells us that otherwise it would have been a draw! Jacques himself once told a few smaller EU countries: "You missed an excellent opportunity to shut up." So did you Jacques. |
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If you got a bit carried away, we thought you should know that a single kiss can contain:
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A Poorly Parrot? Nelson the parrot was taken to a vet for £100 worth of tests to find out why he had a really nasty cough. It turned out that Nelson had originally lived in an old people's home, and was copying all the sounds he had heard there, which also included lots of moans and groans! We read this in The Week |
How to make £999,999.50 profit on a pair of pants.1/ Buy some little gold "hot pants" for 50p in Portobello Rd Market, London. 2/ Ensure that Kylie Minogue (a small Australian pop singer) wears them while being filmed. 3/ Put the pants in a bullet-proof box in an Australian museum and insure them for £1,000,000. This is a true story from The Week in Jan 2005. And as we're not entirely sure how Miss Minogue's glorious singing voice has caused the value of her pants to rise so dramatically, we're going to have to study them very carefully. | ||
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The best PUT DOWN line we've heard this year... The Guardian newspaper got 14,000 of their readers to send personal letters to voters in Clark County, Ohio, USA telling them why they should not vote for George Bush. Unsurprisingly they received back tons of letters along the lines of "...we aren't interested in your limp-wristed, knocked-kneed, bed wetting, tea-sipping opinions." Nevertheless, one of the Guardian staff who thought up the idea put a message on the Guardian website saying "this is probably the most important thing I've ever done at work." We offer our HUGE LOVE AND RESPECT to the US person who replied "Don't sell yourself short kid, people need coffee too." We read this in The Week Nov 2004 |
HEINZ BAKED BEANS at any one time! We read this in The Week | |||
who have one sauna for every two citizens and The World Mobile Phone Thowing Championships! and their own translation of Murderous Maths |
Dan Houghton of Cumbria. He's a retired property developer who turned down £3,000,000 for a field he owned, because he wanted the local youth football club to play on it instead. Good man. We read this in The Week |
who just died peacefully aged 89. He was the world's expert in putting out massive oil rig fires. He was about as near as we'll get to having a real superman. | ||
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THE TINIEST TIME! Scientists have measured the shortest time ever recorded - it's 100 attoseconds which is one ten million billionth of a second. (0.0000000000000001 of a second) If you compare that with a full second, it's like comparing one second with 300 million years! We read this in The Week March 2004 |
We read this in The Week May 2004 |
Mike Bromfeld was was 17,000 feet up Mount Everest when he heard that his football team Yeovil Town were in the play-offs against Hull. He immediately hiked for 72 hours through a blizzard to an airstrip, caught a plane to Kathmandu, flew on to Heathrow and rushed to Somerset to watch the match. Yeovil lost 2-1. We read this in The Week May 2004 |
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THE DICE HOUSE When you buy your ticket you throw 6 normal dice, and pay £1 for every spot that's showing - so you could get in for £6. The good news is that if you throw six sixes they let you in free and give you a chocolate eclair!  |
a DIAMOND the size of a PLANET! It's 2,500 miles across and weighs over 2,000 trillion trillion tons! The bad news is that it's 3,300 light years away at the core of a white dwarf star in the constellation of Cepheus. We read this in THE WEEK March 2004 |
 Er... surely everybody has a 100% chance that they'll die? |
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THE DARKNESS who just won 3 Brit awards. They have weird hair, bizarrely out-dated clothes, and know how to enjoy themselves. Therefore if the music business had failed them, the top rockers from Lowestoft could so easily have been Pure Mathematicians. We love them. |
The REAL Truants!
The government recently had a debate on truancy in schools. 639 MPs didn't even bother to turn up (that's a truancy rate of 97%), and out of the 20 that DID bother, eight of them sneaked out early! We read this in THE WEEK Jan 2004 |
TATU are planning to run against President Putin in the March elections! The rules says that candidates have to be over 35, but Yulia is 18 and Lena is 19, so added together that makes 37 - therefore they claim that they qualify! |
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POTUS and FLOTUS
Isn't it cheering to know that this is what two of the most important people on the planet are called! Apparently that's how the bureaucrats refer to the President Of The United States and his wife who is the First Lady Of The United States. We read this in The Week Nov 2003. |
33% of American visitors to Scotland think the haggis is an
animal and 25% think they can hunt one. Funny that, because 0% of
Scottish visitors to America think a McDonald's burger is an animal and
nobody wants to hunt one.
(A haggis is actually a stuffed sheep stomache and people eat it.)
We read this in The WEEK Dec 2003 |
The number of spiders eaten by the average human in their sleep during
their life time is EIGHT! We read the in the WEEK Dec 2003 |
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UNLUCKY 13
The UK National Lottery has just had its ninth birthday. The luckiest number has been 38 which has been drawn 150 times. But the UNLUCKIEST number -only drawn 91 times - is 13! See the MM guide to the lottery odds. We read this in The Week Nov 2003 |
We're sorry to see you go, even if you flew faster than a rifle bullet. However the fact that really interests us is that for EVERY passenger that ever flew on you, it cost taxpayers about £3300. So we've all paid a lot of money just to make sure a few millionaires weren't late for lunch. We read this in The Week Oct 2003 |
STARS and SAND!
There are ten times MORE stars in the night sky than grains of sand on all the world's beaches and deserts! Apparently with a good modern telescope, the number of stars visible in the sky from Earth is about 70 sextillion, which is a 7 with 22 zeros. Of course this is only a tiny number compared to the total number of stars in the universe! We read this in The Week June 2003 | ||
| THE ATKINS DIET! 3,000,000 people in Britain are on the "Atkins" diet. If they each lose 5kg, that makes a total weight loss of 15,000 TONNES! |
Bob Hope: The legendary 100 year old comic died recently. "A bank is a place that will lend you money just so long as you can prove that you don't need it." "I grew up with 6 brothers. That's how I learnt to dance, waiting for the bathroom." We'll miss him. We read this in The Week Aug 03 |
The singer Max Bygraves has had his records banned from a charity shop in Canterbury because they are impossible to sell. "A lot of my fans are with us no more" admitted Max who is aged 80. It seems a weak excuse because sales of the MM books are growing every week and the author is aged 107. | ||
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The Shrinking Kilogram!
The exact weight of a kilogramme is measured against one very special kg weight which was made in England out of platinum-iridium back in 1889, and ever since it has been kept in a sealed vault in Paris. BUT... over the last 114 years it's got lighter thanks to microscopic surface abrasion. (Don't ask us what that is because we don't know.) The difference is similar to having a 1kg bag of sugar and removing a single grain. So if you buy a bag of sugar and find a grain missing, you know who to blame. We read this in The Week June 2003 |
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THE PINK PERIL
Big respect for schools on the Isle of Wight who have found a diabolical way to deal with troublemakers! They make them ride on a bright pink school bus with no heating, small hard seats crammed together and... it only travels VERY VERY SLOWLY! We read this in The Week May 2003 |
A REAL Murderous Maths Book A Croatian teacher who went missing for three days was found trapped under a pile of books. He had been reaching for an ALGEBRA book when his entire bookshelf came crashing down on top of him. We read this in The Week May 2003 |
We offer BIG RESPECT to the University of Bradford!
They spent £20,000 and waited 3 months
for a team of experts to think of a groovy new name for them.
In the end they were given 3 choices: "University of Bradford",
"The University of Bradford" or (wait for it...)
"Bradford University". | ||
Beware! Computer keyboards can have five times more dangerous bacteria than a lavatory seat!
This is due to people eating while operating computers, and not washing their hands. YUK!
89% of children who play the flute are girls.
But at least LIVE EARTH got its message through to us. Unlike the fleets of private jets and limos that the celebs travelled in, we didn't waste any petrol going there and we even saved electricity by turning off our tellies and not watching. Instead we were playing
So long Mr Yeltsin
Murderous Maths is delighted to have helped the UK cultural secretary Tessa Jowell with her sums. The original estimated cost of the 2012 Olympics was £2,400,000,000. Since reading the Essential Arithmetricks Tessa has worked out it will really cost £9,350,000,000 which is almost SEVEN BILLION pounds more, or about FOUR TIMES as much. It's a good job she checked with us, isn't it?
Remember, it doesn't matter who you are. We're here when you need us.
WOD A SWINGIN' PORDY!
Doubtless it's because his nice wife Victoria (we like her too) bought him a copy of 
In 
